


hard to find (coming back from what seemed like a ruin)

by thirteenghosts (newsbypostcard)



Category: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-26 13:11:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/thirteenghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s something about getting to know a person the second time, Clementine thinks, that hits you right in the gut. You don’t remember how much you ached before, but you still have the knowledge that -- if you ached at all -- it wasn’t <em>this much</em>, somehow; you have the knowledge that this is a brand new feeling. And that’s terrifying and comforting all at once -- that you’ve never had to feel this before; that you’re feeling it now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hard to find (coming back from what seemed like a ruin)

There’s something about getting to know a person the second time, Clementine thinks, that hits you right in the gut. You don’t remember how much you ached before, but you still have the knowledge that -- if you ached at all -- it wasn’t _this much_ , somehow; you have the knowledge that this is a brand new feeling. And that’s terrifying and comforting all at once -- that you’ve never had to feel this before; that you’re feeling it now.

Joel has a fucking ... sofa bed. His bed? Folds into a sofa. His sofa folds out to become a bed. And that fucking _kills her_ , for whatever reason, when she wakes up in it at some fucked-up hour of the evening, when the sun is tucking itself back into the horizon of the buildings peering in from the windows.

Like -- _fuck_ , Joel.  
You don’t even have a goddamn bed.

Like, there’s a spare room, and there’s a mattress against the wall. But it’s a single mattress. And she gets up to stare at it in its royal purple absurdity, gripping at the doorway of the clutter room, digging her fingernails into the wood to see if it’ll splinter; and it was a bedroom, once, and it could be again, but in the meantime he sleeps on a fucking sofa bed, and the emotion scrabbles in her ribcage until it drives her back into the living room.

And she’s staring at him as he’s flopped down on his stomach, and he’s wheezing in his sleep, and it’s irritating. Christ, is it irritating. But is she irritated because it’s irritating now, or because it was irritating when she doesn’t remember? It’s that fucking tension, the not knowing, that’s the saddest thing. It aches. His irritating wheezing aches.

She curls back up on the bed and then wraps the comforter around herself, becomes a slugperson, and tugs on the hair curling off his toes until he wakes up. He blinks blearily as the last rays of sunlight slant over the lower half of the sofa bed, starts, finds her sitting at the end of the bed, and his entire expression is wide open.

“Hi,” he says as he shudders awake, and his eyes are awash in gratitude until they aren’t, the gaze devolves into something suddenly distant and familiar and unknown.

“Hi,” she replies. And he nestles back down into his pillow and looks at her with his neck at some impossible angle, and fuck, that’s sad, too, isn’t it, _god_ , why does everything have to be so _sad?_

She lies down next to him and takes him into the comforter, her hands wafting chastely over him, and she presses her forehead against his.

“What is -- what are you doing?” he asks. And she _bristles_ , because he was going to be condescending, probably; but then he wasn’t, so she fixes the collar of his ridiculous plaid pyjamas instead of blowing up like she feels tempted to do, like she knows he expects of her, or did once. Or maybe she’s imagining it because doesn’t she always do this? Assume everyone thinks she’s stupid? Isn’t that exactly what she doesn’t care about anymore? 

_God, god, what was it ever like to know anything._

“Making a two-headed slugperson,” she replies instead of screaming, and it’s perfect until the last syllable gets cut off too early somewhere in her throat.

Joel blinks at her and smiles, a shallow, melancholy smile; and then he holds a thumb up to her cheek, and everything aches.

“Who are you?” he asks quietly.

She takes his face into the palm of her hand on instinct, traces his lips with her thumb. “You know.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t. I really don’t.”

She swallows around this fucking lump in her throat that feels like it might never leave and tugs the comforter up to her nose. “Then maybe you never did.”

\-----

They spend a lot of time like this: lying tangled into one another, trying to stop forgetting.

There hovers something unspoken between them that reminds Joel of yet another thing he can’t remember. A poem, maybe. He still knows that he reads. There are books on his shelf that look well-worn that he has no memory of either reading himself or ever seeing Naomi read. Peering into one revealed the telltale turns of his own handwriting in the margins. A godawful habit he’d picked up in college, and one he now desperately rued.

 _Did I read these to you?_ he asks her silently as she naps on the couch. He’s halfway into his quotidian existential crisis, and he stares at her as she sleeps with a hand pressed over his mouth as though keeping something in. _Why are they still here if I don’t remember?_

_But then, why are you?_

He eventually considers the pages torn from his journal and settles on that as an explanation, for why the memory was gone while the evidence was still here. Then with a sudden pang he throws all the books he doesn’t recognize into a garbage bag, throws the bag into the clutter room, and then suddenly, angrily -- on a whim -- throws the whole fucking lot out the window.

He thinks of the whim that was the train to Montauk. Did they throw books out the window before, too?

Oddly he doesn’t think he’d have been on board for that.

He returns nervously to the living room and puts on the kettle, lets the steam lap at his face, starts reading a book he’s read -- remembers reading -- six times before; and if she notices the change in the bookshelf when she wakes up, she doesn’t say anything.

And that was the whole goddamn problem in a nutshell, wasn’t it? If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. He himself was sneaking around, expunging their past while she was asleep. How honest was that? Was honesty something they should even be striving for? Who the fuck knew?

Which led them to here, to where they so often were: to lying around, saying nothing, doing nothing, except clinging loosely to each other. Like they represented something _important_. But the more time went on, the more Joel figured out that there was nothing there at all, that they’d _had that part of them removed_ , and Christ, didn’t that count for _anything?_

“I picked up an interesting book the other day,” she’s saying, her hand clenched in his hoodie.

“You don’t have to do this,” he replies. Her hair is orange ~~again.~~

“No, I’m serious.”

“Was this at work?”

“Yes, Joel, it was at work. I work with books, what do you want?”

“I just -- Barnes and Noble?”

“What the fuck is wrong with Barnes and Noble?”

“Nothing.”

“They have good fucking books at Barnes and Noble, okay?”

“I’m sure.”

A pause; her fingers trace his collar. “It was about the Tang Dynasty,” she says quietly.

“ _Táng_ Dynasty,” he corrects automatically; and the regret cascades over him in the moment before she replies.

“What? That’s what I said.”

“No, you -- it’s more of a question. Táng Dynasty.”

“Tang Dynasty?”

“No. There’s -- it’s emphatic. You know what, forget it.”

“No, let’s -- teach me how to say it.”

“It’s nothing, it’s not a big deal. You read this book?”

“I -- well, I picked it up.”

He pauses. The dread thrums within him.

“You’re judging the fuck out of me right now.” Her voice sounds hollow, but her words resonate deep within him all the same.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes you fucking are, Joel! You don’t think I can read a fucking book?”

“I don’t think -- it’s not who you are.”

Her hands are gone and she’s sitting up, staring down at him, and he resists the overwhelming drive to curl up into a ball beneath the severity of her gaze. “Oh really? And how would you have the slightest fucking idea who I am, _Joel_?”

“I didn't mean--”

“God, you always fucking do this! You always--”

And then she cuts off, and this is worse than the fight, god, this is _agony_ , this is torture in the form of a silence. His nerves are screaming, gripping at every inch of him, and every instinct he has is telling him to run and by looking at her he knows she feels the same thing; but somehow all they can do is stare at each other. They share in this wide-eyed horror, and it’s the same fear that leads them to lie around at each other’s apartments, laughing hollowly at the television and eating and drinking to excess to try to kill the mounting knowledge that they each represent to the other only something that’s been lost. And it fucking _settles_ , the knowledge that they really are fucking this up all over again mostly because they already have, and along with it Joel suddenly knows:

“This isn’t working.”

The phrase is torn from him like a gasp, and it’s the truest thing he thinks he’s said in weeks.

“No,” and he isn’t sure if it’s an agreement or a denial until she adds, “you don’t get to quit,” and then he again prefers the silence to the sound of her voice.

“We’re trying to -- we’re -- Clem, listen to me, Clem, we’re trying to--”

“You don’t fucking _get to quit, Joel!_ ”

“We’re trying to build something on the world’s shittiest foundation, Clem--”

“ _You told me to wait--_ ”

“--we’re building a facade on a crumbling rockface--”

“Did you get that from one of your goddamn bullshit poetry books?”

“It’s just -- we’re not gonna just wish our way out of this.” They’re standing, suddenly, half a room apart, and his chest is heaving and so is hers, and everything is fire and ice. “We built ourselves an unbelievably complex booby trap, Clem. We fucked ourselves. We really fucked ourselves.”

“I never have any fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

“We don’t have to be trapped in here.” He gesticulates around the apartment, points at everything, points at nothing, which actually seemed pretty fitting given the circumstances. “We don’t have to expect us to replace ourselves. I don’t know about you, but for me -- there is no fucking joy here. We’re -- fermenting. We’re just fermenting” He shrugs, and his eyes fill unexpectedly. “If this is all we are, then maybe we’re best left forgotten.”

And that does something, shatters something in her, and she turns and storms out without a word; and this time, though his chest is taught with devastation, he lets her go.

\-----

But then, three days later, she’s sitting on the ledge outside his apartment when he comes home from work, smoking a cigarette for some reason; and he looks at her and she looks at him, and he holds the door open for her without a word exchanged.

They watch Huckleberry Hound with fingers entwined, and he smiles often -- but only when she laughs thickly with nostalgia, and god help them both, the pang twists and contorts until it’s not quite _good_ but at least ranks at _bittersweet_. And maybe that’s enough.

\-----

He never fills the gaps in the bookshelf.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Hard to Find and Pink Rabbits from The National, respectively.


End file.
